


In Which It is Late During Finals Week

by spocksevilgodmother



Category: H.I.V.E. Series - Mark Walden
Genre: what happened to ivan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-16
Updated: 2019-05-16
Packaged: 2020-03-06 10:13:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18848965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spocksevilgodmother/pseuds/spocksevilgodmother
Summary: As Ivan is preparing to clean up one night, he runs into Franz, who feels demoralized by the pressures of finals week. Ivan offers what consolations he can.





	In Which It is Late During Finals Week

It was late. Time to clear up. It was still a while yet until lights out—throughout the school, there would still be students loitering in the accommodation blocks and cramming for finals in the library—but this hallway was quiet. Ivan preferred it that way. After a long day surrounded by the clanking of pans and hissing of pots boiled over, to say nothing of the students’ chatter, the relative peace was a welcome change. It would take the cleaning process longer, but at least it would be calm.

Plotting Room Two was shut. This was no obstacle, of course, but he still paused. Dr. Nero couldn’t still be in class, could he? After pausing to listen for any noise on the other side of the mahogany, Ivan knocked softly and pushed the door open. It was not, as he had expected, empty.

“Hi Ivan.” The Argentblum boy—no stranger to H.I.V.E.’s culinary staff—looked up from a laptop’s glow. He looked exhausted. Even from across the room, Ivan could see the bags under the boy’s eyes. 

“Franz,” Ivan replied. “Are you supposed to be in here? It’s late.”

“Nein.” Franz shut his laptop. “Probably not. Dr. Nero said I could be staying after class to finish up a paper, but the time escaped me.”

Ivan nodded, unsurprised. It wasn’t the first time he had caught a student in the throes of study. 

“It’s time for me to put away the spread,” Ivan said. He walked to the west wall, where two tables clothed in crimson split the monotony of the black marble walls. A small cart hid underneath one of the tables. Ivan pushed back the red cloth and pulled it out.

“Can I help in some way?” Franz asked. 

Ivan nodded. “All the platters go on the cart.”

Franz joined Ivan at the tables. He quietly stacked the plates, careful to place those with the widest diameter at the bottom of the pile. When a piece of fruit or block of cheese remained, Franz didn’t hesitate to pop it into his mouth. Still, Ivan could see that Franz was in a low place. Normally, the chef wouldn’t bother to ask—how often did a student care about his problems, after all? But Franz was a familiar face around the kitchens. He was a pleasant boy. Smart, too, even if the English sometimes eluded him. Even then, Ivan sympathized. He, too, had once been a boy from Eastern Europe with a funny accent. 

“How are your studies?” Ivan asked.

“End of term is always difficult,” Franz replied, keeping his voice light. “I just need to spend some little more time with studying.”

“A,” Ivan corrected.

“A,” Franz agreed. “A little more time.”

They were quiet another moment, Ivan pulling the crimson tablecloth up and beginning to match its corners. Franz stared at his reflection in a platter. 

“Something on your mind?” Ivan asked.

Franz swallowed. “How did you come to work for H.I.V.E.?”

Ivan stopped to look Franz up and down. The boy froze, worried that he had stepped too far, too fast. His round face crinkled with anxiety. Ivan let it hang for a long moment, then nodded, almost as if to himself. 

“I’ve worked for Dr. Nero many years,” he said, his accent slipping into its familiar form as he thought back on his early days. “When we first met, I was a small-time truffle smuggler out of Oregon. I promised the good doctor that I could make him a filet mignon as he’d never had—I never dreamed that he would offer me a position at his school. It was in the Arctic, then.”

“What would you be doing if you had not accepted?”

Ivan shrugged his shoulders with a non-committal frown. “It’s hard to say. Maybe I continue smuggling truffles. Maybe I build a restaurant to rip off all those richie-riches. Maybe I end up in prison.”

“Would have,” Franz said quietly.

Ivan accepted the correction gracefully. “Would have,” he agreed. “It’s hard to say. There are some paths that take you far away from the life you thought you would have lived.”

Franz took in this information with a pensive look on his face. By this time, the dishes were stacked neatly on their cart, and Ivan pulled up the next tablecloth, creasing the cloth with razor precision. Franz looked around. The room looked darker without the shiny platters reflecting the light. The only spots of brightness were the paper cups spilling out of the garbage cans posted at either end of the table.

“Will you be taking the rubbish?” 

“No, there will be others.” Ivan wheeled the cart to the door. “I will only wipe down the tables.”

He offered Franz a damp cloth, which the boy accepted. 

“What were you doing today that needed all this food?”

Franz smiled slightly at that. “Our end-of-term presentations for Villainy Studies. It was meant to be a celebration as well as a test. Dr. Nero asked us to present on a villain we were not discussing in class this semester. My friend Shelby gave a presentation on herself. It was extremely funny. I almost choked on my pastry muffin.”

“I’m sure it was.” Ivan knew Shelby. He kept his facial expression in check for Franz’s sake. That girl had sent back her food too often to be a welcome face around the kitchens. “Who was in your presentation?”

“A man named Emilio Largo,” Franz shrugged. “He stole some nuclear weapons. He popularized the shark tank as we know it. Yet he wasn’t the inspiring type for me.”

“Oh no?”

“No. I think it is just the end of term, but it is hard to find anything interesting mostly.”

Ivan hummed a little tune as he finished polishing the last table. “It isn’t unusual, you know, to feel fatigued. In just a few days, you’ll have your two week break, and you won’t have the burdens of classes to worry about.”

“But what if it doesn’t end?” Franz pressed, his brown eyes piercing and sad. “How can I keep sight of the future when I can never look beyond the school walls? How… how do I keep the spirit?”

Ivan contemplated Franz for a moment. He was not a man accustomed to classrooms; he much preferred a knife in his hand to a pen. Even so, he recognized that this was one of the rare occasions when he was called upon to teach, and he didn’t want to rush. He plucked the black apron strap from around his neck and freed the tie in the back, laying it out to fold it with the same care he had given the tablecloths.

“I don’t know how to find the spirit,” he admitted. “It does not always come when we will it.”

Franz sighed. He pulled up his messenger bag from the chair and slung it over his shoulder. “It’s just that I don’t want to hate it here,” he said plaintively.

Ivan looked Franz straight in the eye. “Some sadness and hate are inevitable, I’m afraid. The thing is to not let your despair anchor you wherever you are. Sometimes we do not know how, but we know we must walk through the dreary days to find our spirit in the beyond.”

“Just ‘beyond,’” Franz corrected.

“No, ‘the’ beyond,” Ivan insisted. “It is a thing.”

Franz looked bewildered, lifting his hands in a half-hearted shrug. “I am not really understanding, Ivan.”

Ivan rolled his eyes. “Listen to Doctor Ivan, Franz. No more homework tonight. Go play a game with your friends. Have H.I.V.E.mind show you one of those movies Professor Pike is always stealing for you. Find some crayon pencils and draw a picture of something that is not evil. That is the best prescription I can offer you.”

Franz walked to the door and looked back, a small smile on his face. “I think I will do that. My friends Laura and Wing and Nigel, maybe. I know they might like to play a game.”

“Good.” Ivan said. “Now get out! You aren’t even supposed to be in here, silly.”

Franz waited—a mischievous disobedience, and they both knew it—then abruptly turned on his heel, letting the heavy door thud into its place behind him. 

Ivan shook his head. The children these days were a marvel and a puzzle, all at once. 

“Lights off, H.I.V.E.mind,” he said to the room, pushing the cart out into the light. The room fell dark. 

“Good night, Ivan,” H.I.V.E.mind said placidly. 

Ivan harrumphed and returned down the hall. The wheel on the cart squeaked a little. He didn’t let it bother him.  It was nice, he thought, to not always be alone. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> Just some notes on details I included. I've experienced the "end-of-year party" throughout my academic career, but when I was in college professors would sometimes coordinate with the caterers to get us some muffins and fruits and really a whole breakfast experience laid out to celebrate our work. I kind of saw this as an end-of-year celebration in the same vein, where they are enjoying some nice food as a class before they get the next button on their collars. 
> 
> There also isn't a discussion of semester breaks in the books, but, along with movies and crayons, I am filing that under "while students are not allowed to leave the island that is where its similarities with a prison end." Obviously, I don't think the students would be allowed to do whatever they wanted for two weeks—they might have to report for Tactical Training or work on an independent study—but I also am quite certain that the teachers and students alike would have a better time of it without needing to report to class every single week day for six years. 
> 
> Anyway, hope you enjoyed. :)


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